The trial that could reshape AI
Getty Images has sued Stability AI for copyright infringement
This is a landmark trial for generative artificial intelligence. For the first time, a key player in the industry is facing legal action: the British startup Stability AI. Best known for its image generator Stable Diffusion, the company is being sued by Getty Images, the major US stock photo agency.
Getty accuses Stability of infringing on its intellectual property by using no less than 12 million images from its catalog to train AI models. Hearings began in early June before the High Court in London and are wrapping up this week. The stakes are high not only for Stability, which is already struggling financially, but also for the future of generative AI: the ruling could influence numerous similar lawsuits currently underway around the world.
Watermark
Getty was among the first to recognize the threat AI posed to its business. In February 2023, it became the first company to file a lawsuit against Stability AI, then the leading player in AI-generated imagery. The first case — still ongoing — was filed in the US, followed by this second one in the UK. These cases are among the most symbolic in the escalating battle between AI model developers and content rights holders whose works have been scraped and used without permission or compensation.
Getty’s main piece of evidence is compelling: some images generated by Stable Diffusion include visible watermarks (the branded logos from Getty's publicly viewable photos). Stability does not even try to deny it; it acknowledges that it pulled images from Getty’s library.
The start-up first line of defense is technical: its lawyers argue that the training of its diffusion models occurred in the US on Amazon cloud servers, and therefore the UK courts lack jurisdiction. However, that argument won’t hold in the upcoming US trial.
Fair use
On the merits, the company claims it did not violate Getty’s intellectual property. It invokes the legal concept of fair use, which allows for the limited use of copyrighted material to create new works with “transformative value”. In other words: the images generated by Stable Diffusion do not replicate Getty's, but rather are inspired by them. “Our tools are producing works built upon collective human knowledge,” says Stability.
This defense strategy is consistent with that of most AI firms facing copyright lawsuits. The core challenge is the lack of clear legal frameworks for generative AI. The outcome of this trial will therefore hinge on judicial interpretation. It’s still unclear whether the decision will set a legal precedent.
On paper, UK copyright law is stricter than US law in defining what qualifies as fair use. Conversely, a recent US court decision introduced a new concept: the “market substitute”. According to that ruling, fair use does not apply if AI services provide a commercial alternative — like generating an image instead of purchasing one, or offering summaries instead of reading articles from news sites.